


Pathways

by SolarPoweredFlashlight



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 12:33:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16832692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SolarPoweredFlashlight/pseuds/SolarPoweredFlashlight
Summary: Riven has made a mistake; werewolves captured by vampires are typically in a bad situation, but the fact that her captor is Katarina Du Couteau only adds insult to injury. Katarina won't be satisfied until she's broken Riven and brought her to heel - but all pathways can be travelled along in both directions.





	1. Chapter 1

“You’re a monster, you know.”

“No less of a monster than _you_ are,” the shadow growls, her silhouette hungry against the washed out moonlight coming through the bars of the small window.

“Predictable,” Katarina snorts, unimpressed. She leans against the frame, the heavy metal door slung wide. An invitation. A challenge. A dare.

“Your kind kills with deliberation, with planning, with a sociopathic lack of morality.” The prisoner shifts slightly, her shackles complaining with dull metallic jangling. She doesn’t take the bait of the open door. The smart ones never do, Katarina thinks, and feels herself become moderately more interested in this new plaything.

“And your mindless destruction is better, I suppose, because you feel like you’re blameless?”

“No,” the chained beast says softly, turning away from Katarina. “Never blameless.”

Boring, Katarina thinks. A werewolf who thinks she’s some kind of suffering saint.

-

“So,” Kat says, as she opens the door, “Are you ready to behave yourself?” Riven looks up, eyes sunken in, her golden glazed irises proof of the sharp edge upon which her human form teeters, precarious. They’ve been that way since about day five of the standard starvation routine. Incredible self control. Most can’t even hold human form by day five.

Riven says nothing. Katarina assumes it’s because her mouth is likely full of wolf teeth, or that trying to talk would push her over. They stare each other down for a few heartbeats – Riven’s heartbeats, since Kat doesn’t exactly have any of her own to measure the passage of time with. Surprisingly slow, calm heartbeats.

“Come here,” Kat says, voice dripping condescension. Werewolves are so predictable. She’ll break, one way or another – bow to the superior strength, or fly into a rage and try to attack.

Riven turns her head away and resumes gazing out the window, like an old dog called for a walk who isn’t in the mood and so feigns deafness. Katarina’s lip curls in annoyance. Werewolves are _supposed_ to be predictable. This one is not.

“Come, _dog_ ,” she tries again, throwing a little more effort (and a little more glamor) into the words. She hears the beast’s heart rate pick up, and her own body sings in predatory response. It sickens her how much she’d like a taste of this one.

“I think I rate a member of your clan with a few more centuries to their name,” Riven says at last, sounding perfectly composed. It’s astonishing, infuriating. Werewolves have insane metabolisms. They haven’t fed her in twelve days. She shouldn’t be able to speak, let alone sling insults.

Emotions war within Katarina. She leaves, slams the door shut. As she storms away, Riven’s steady heart beats chase her down the dungeon halls.

-

It takes another ten days of starving her before she becomes what they want her – a hulking, shaggy white monster.

“Pretty colouring,” Katarina muses, and Riven throws herself against her shackles. Despite knowing how strong the chains are, Kat takes an unconscious step back, and immediately rebukes herself for it, glad nobody was around to see it. The pale beast is eerily silent, her stare intense and unblinking, and that unnerves Kat more than a roaring, snarling show of anger. Kat spins the heavy metal collar in her hands, effortlessly toying with the thick steel device that would undoubtedly snap a human in half if dropped on them from a short height.

“Hungry?” she taunts, and braces herself for the next lunge. Lost in her animal side, Riven is finally predictable, and lunge she does. This time Katarina doesn’t flinch. “You _are_ a monster. And if you want to live, you’re going to learn that you’re _my_ monster.” Riven has no response for this but a flashing of her teeth. Katarina flashes her own right back – a reaction that has made bigger werewolves cower at her feet, in decades gone by, but doesn’t seem to impress Riven.

Katarina holds up the collar. “You want to get fed, you do as you’re told.” Riven watches, golden eyes murky with unknowable intent and unmistakable intensity. “Sit, beast.” There is a taut pause, and then slowly, slowly, the monstrous creature lowers itself to its haunches. It doesn’t appear to be a relaxing of her guard so much as the coiling of a spring.

She knows, already, what’s going to happen. Katarina takes one step forward, then, two, as if she thinks she’s going to be putting the choke collar on Riven without a fight. Then, when Riven launches, Kat’s hand whips out and slaps her reaching maw aside with such force that it rips her jaw asunder.

Silence broken, Riven screams in pain.

“Make sure you set that properly before it starts to heal,” Katarina remarks, dryly, before she turns away and leaves the cell. It’s obvious now that there’s still too much intelligence, too much consciousness, lurking inside that beast.

-

Day twenty three of no food, Riven doesn’t move when Katarina opens the door, doesn’t respond when she speaks, doesn’t tense when she approaches. Kat would worry the beast is dead if she couldn’t hear the everpresent sound of her beating heart.

Riven’s golden eye slits open, watching. Kat feels confident her reflexes are fast enough to react the moment she sees any muscle moment that suggests an attack is coming, even at such close range, and so without any fear she seizes the werewolf by the snout and presses at where bone broke in her jaw a few days ago.

A low growl starts in Riven’s throat, but Kat pays it no mind as she manhandles her face.

“Slow to heal, not like the overnight miracle after we captured you. Not much left in you, is there? At least you set it properly like you were told to.” Kat is pleased to see the involuntary bristle of hairs that stand up along Riven’s neck at her words. Let the werewolf wonder whether she set her own jaw because it was logical and necessary, or because she succumbed to a glamored order from a vampire.

“If you’d behave,” Kat muses wickedly, stroking her thumb along the awkward ridge of half-healed bone through dense white fur, “then I’d feed you. And if you were thinking you’d do the noble thing and let yourself starve before you’d give in to my kind, well. I think you’re discovering at a certain point the beast takes over and does whatever it has to, to survive.” Riven growls again, showing Katarina her teeth up close and personal. The longest of the canines is probably the length of Kat’s hand, from the tip of her middle finger to the heel of her thumb, but she isn’t intimidated. Size isn’t everything, and besides that, Riven is small for a werewolf. Small but compact, Katarina thinks, enjoying the feeling of the subdued creature’s massive head in her hands. There’s no shortage of muscle on this one.

She strokes her fingers though the dense ruff of fur that coats Riven’s neck, enjoying the way her growling ramps up and her body tenses and she finally, finally, starts to give off the smells of fear. Katarina closes her eyes and inhales deeply. The way it makes her feel conjures long-ago memories of being lured into the kitchens by the smell of freshly baked bread. Her mouth fills not with saliva, but with numbing venom.

No. This isn’t how she wants to taste her, scrawny and starved and helpless. Might as well be drinking from a corpse. She’ll wait.

“Relax,” Katarina whispers, a smirk crawling across her face. “Most vintages taste better after they’ve been aged properly.” She stands and walks away from where the werewolf lies draped across the cobblestones, inert. After regarding Riven for a while, Katarina picks the massive collar up from beside the door. “Come here.”

Riven turns her eyes up at her, and takes a deep breath that seems to make her inflate to half her size again. Her long tongue darts out and licks her wet, black nose – nervous. Tense. Her ears tilt forward. Intent. Hungry. Focused on a goal. Finally she rises, up on all fours like a lumbering grizzly, perfectly capable of coming to a fully raised position but choosing not to.

She walks towards Katarina, to the end of her chain, and sits.

-

Riven earns her meals by fighting in the Pit for the entertainment of the younger, easily bored members of Katarina’s clan. This sort of wanton bloodshed does little to amuse those in the thousands of years old pedigree, but to Katarina and her two and three century old siblings, it is the height of entertainment to raise prized monsters and pit them against one another.

Katarina’s White Wolf is quite popular, because she’s small and fights like a beast three times her size. The blood shows bright and vibrant against her fur, like crimson silk on snow, and it adds to the spectacle.

Kat finds herself growing impatient for the day she “retires” her White Wolf and finally cracks that seal and drains her dry. And oh, she knows there will be no sampling delicately of this one. The way Riven looks at her, fury blazing hot in her ever-golden eyes, makes her sure it will be a violent and ecstatic feeding when it finally happens.

The taste is unlikely to be very good – dogblood is infamously gamey and even undrinkable, in some cases – but the experience, oh, she anticipates it more and more every time she watches Riven tear apart another challenger. When the battle is over and Riven turns, without fail, to find Kat in the crowd and stare wordlessly, her snout stained in blood and gore and her expression frozen in hateful neutrality – it’s all Kat can do not to descend on her then and there with everybody watching.

-

“I need more than just raw meat,” Riven says one day, as Katarina brings the spoils of her battle – a metal dog bowl filled with offal.

“Is that right,” Katarina laughs, pushing the bowl across the floor with her foot, enjoying the way Riven cringes at the loud noise it makes. “Do you prefer a red wine with your dead cow bits, or a white?”

“Some vegetables would be nice. Some starches. You could even, you know, _cook_ the meat.”

“My White Wolf thinks she’s still a human. How cute.” Riven doesn’t have the sort of ears that she can flatten at that comment, but the rest of her body language communicates her disgust somehow without it.

The other vampires ridicule her for it, but Katarina starts feeding her plaything steamed vegetables and cooked meat. She boasts loudly about how she expects diet is the main reason werewolf blood tastes so terrible, and repeats it so often that she starts to believe it. Privately, Katarina expects the day she finally feeds from the White Wolf will be a crescendo of agonizingly singular ecstasy. She worries she’ll never be able to experience anything quite like it ever again, but decides that will be a problem she can solve later in the many centuries she has left to enjoy the pleasures the world has to offer.

-

Katarina is a fool to think she has her beast tamed, and she knows this on some level. That’s why the idea of the ultimate subjugation, feeding from her, is so exciting.

Still, it comes as a surprise when Riven finally strikes. Kat has known for a while that the werewolf is unusually talented at regulating her own body – her metabolism, her breathing, her heart rate – but doesn’t realize this means she can hide her intent to attack until it’s too late.

Katarina opens the door holding the food bowl full of dinner, and maybe it’s the thick, meaningless smell of the food that delays her realization that Riven is right there waiting for her. She’s in wolf shape of her own volition for the first time Kat’s ever seen, and simply bowls Katarina right over, cracking her head hard against the metal doorframe. Tonight’s menu scatters wildly across the floor, and in a flash Riven is gone.

With a startled, angry snarl, Katarina struggles to her feet.

“Come _here_ ,” she shouts down the hallway, putting every ounce of magical force she can into the command, but she’s already too far away for it to make much difference. Dammit. She’s been feeding her too well. Dammit fuck dammit fucking fuck.

Katarina storms after her, following the sweaty scent of her adrenaline. She won’t get far.

She follows Riven’s trail down to the back entrances of the Pit, where the doors are only made of wood. She finds one ripped off its hinges, and her anger boils, along with a spark of arousal. Mayhem and power speaks clearly and cleanly to what turns Kat on, and always has. She has to push aside the thoughts of what she’ll do to Riven when she catches her and actually focus on catching her.

Out into the Pit, the ease with which Riven has clearly climbed up and past its massive stone walls makes Katarina wonder if any of the security measures they have in place are actually effective. She thinks, as she follows the path of scent Riven’s sweaty palms have left on the stone, of all those times the werewolf has looked up at her after a battle – thinks of how easily she could have vaulted up into the crowd and made an attempt to rip her apart.

Not that she’d last long in a crowd of vampires. It would just be the night of her capture all over again.

It then strikes Katarina that she’s left it unusually late tonight to feed her wolf. It’s nearly daybreak.

“Fuck,” she swears aloud, picking up the pace. If Riven actually escapes and evades capture long enough for the sun to rise, she may vanish forever. The others would never let Katarina hear the end of it, not until Riven was hunted down and destroyed.

“I’m going to fucking kill you when I catch you,” Kat hisses, following Riven’s scent through winding corridors. They’re getting closer to surface level. This is bad.

Kat catches her in a storage room. Riven’s made a mistake, turned down the wrong hallway. She knows her way around the dungeons and the Pit, but this is new ground. Cornered, Riven turns and snarls, ready to fight. She settles into a position Kat’s seen her in a dozen times before – tense and loose, protected and prepared. She has killed, starting from this position. For once of a few rare times in her long life, Katarina feels fear.

She steels herself. She’s in close range now. Her voice should work.

“Down. _Now._ ” At the command, a shudder runs through Riven’s body, but she doesn’t obey. Damn her. Damn her to a thousand hells.

Riven attacks, but this time Katarina is ready. They rip and tear at one another, blow to blow. 

Again and again they clash, brutal and furious, months of tension and frustration and hatred poured into each strike. 

Riven’s blood speckles the floor of the storeroom, but Katarina pauses to catch herself and realizes she’s taken a number of nasty wounds herself. She’s going to need to feed.

Her eyes fix on Riven. Katarina still stands between her and the only door out, ragged, angry, thirsty.

“Come,” Katarina says, a hoarse whisper, and tastes the power in the command in a way she never has before. On the wings of her desperate, visceral _need_ for Riven, she taps in to a font of control that is new and strange and heady.

On trembling legs, Riven steps towards her. The lamblike movement sets Katarina’s insides to an excited flurry. Finally, _finally_ , Riven is hers, truly hers. Not just grudgingly obeying out of her own rationale, or out of the desire to live. Obeying because at last Katarina’s words have taken hold properly.

“Mine,” Katarina whispers, enraptured by the glorious vulnerability of this new mastery. Fangs sheathed, heart thumping harder than Kat’s ever heard it, Riven comes to sit at her feet. It’s a surprise, but a pleasant one, when the great beast presses the flat of her monstrous head against Katarina’s shin. The heat of her is unbelievable, unbearable. Katarina runs her fingers lavishly through the thick fur of a massive temple. Her whole body seems to throb with each one of Riven’s heartbeats. She wants her. She needs her.

“Change back,” Katarina says, and wonders at how little it sounds like herself. More – no, she doesn’t like to think it. She shouldn’t be thinking at all, shouldn’t be questioning how she’s finally discovered how to control her White Wolf after months of trying. At her feet, Riven is shrinking, muzzle pulling back into a human shape, tail receding, vanishing.

Katarina is on top of her before she’s even fully human, pressing their bodies together, sucking in deep gulps of the smell of her, grasping her hair tight and pressing her into the floor.

“Please,” Katarina finds herself saying, the word spilling urgently from her mouth. Riven bucks up against her, grinding hips to hips.

“Yes,” Riven croaks, raw and insistent. She grabs at Katarina’s head, rough thumbs stroking pale cheeks, and surges upwards to kiss her. Kat can taste her own blood – dull, empty of nutrition – on Riven’s tongue, evidence of the fury of their just-fought battle. It’s nothing like Katarina expected it to go, certainly, but –

Riven bites Katarina’s lip, and the jolt cements her awareness firmly in the present. It’s too much, so much, and she withdraws her hands from Riven’s hair to push her jaw up and to the side, exposing her neck. Katarina longs to take her rough and ragged, to waste no more time, but is gripped inexplicably by the desire to do as little damage as possible, and so gently, tortuously slowly she tastes her way up and down Riven’s veins until she finds the perfect spot.

Riven is breathing hard, her palms pressed flat against the cold floor and her desire filling Katarina’s sense of smell.

“Does it hurt?” Riven murmurs, voice thick and gravelly on the heels of her transformation back to human form. 

“No,” Katarina promises against the skin of Riven’s neck, and revels in the eager arching of the woman below her. Surely this can’t all be the power of her suggestion. None of her prey have ever seemed so conscious, so controlled.

Katarina presses her lips to her chosen spot and luxuriates in each throbbing pulse of blood that she can feel against her mouth. She allows herself one, two, and then Riven is whimpering her impatience, promising exquisitely sexual violence with the bite of her human nails against Katarina’s lower back. Vampire venom is a wonderful thing, to give its victim such physical bliss and take away what surely should be agonizing.

She bites, and as her fangs penetrate the flesh of Riven’s neck a jolt of pleasure seizes her like a gasp of fresh air after too long underwater. Tangled in a sweaty, exuberant mess of half-clothed limbs, she drinks from Riven and shudders as she feels the strangeness of the magic form and stretch and tighten between them. For a moment it feels like she is both Riven and Katarina, quaking helplessly in the ecstasy of surrender, of the giving of lifeforce, of the incomparable pleasure of being fed upon, and simultaneously feeling herself filled up with power, drinking deep of a nectar unmatched by any food or drink, revelling in the glory of complete ownership of so divine a creature.

Katarina feeds until she needs no more, and then – one of many surprises of the night – forces herself to stop. Too good, this is too good to use up all in one go. She pulls away from Riven and feels that intangible bond solidify further. Somewhere in the back of her mind, warning bells go off. No, no, she’ll deal with that later. Enjoy the moment. Don’t waste it on worrying about what she’s just done.

“God,” Riven groans against her. Katarina laughs breathlessly. (Since when has she needed breath?)

“God’s got nothing to do with either you or me, beast.”

“Use my name,” Riven says, eyes closed, chin still thrown back. How is she so composed already? “I know you know it.”

“And why should I?” Katarina purrs, feeling confident in her newfound ability to control this wayward werewolf.

“Because I’m about to fuck you,” Riven murmurs hoarsely, flipping Katarina over onto her back and claiming the top, “and I’d like to hear you use my name at least once while I’m doing it.”

Katarina had thought they were done for the night, but suddenly her innards twist with a related but different sort of hunger. Riven looks down at her, eyes a rich brown, and somehow it excites Katarina more to know that she’s the object of attention for the rational, thoughtful, strategic woman they captured all those months ago.

“Go on then,” Katarina smirks up at her, enjoying the sight of Riven’s still open neck wounds. “Impress me.” Riven is already kissing and biting her way down Katarina’s torso, her hands rough and covetous. Katarina’s skin seems to spark with heat at touch, reliving the full-body pleasure of the feeding inch by inch. When that hot mouth finds its mark, it’s like being alive again. Her mind goes blank and her body races with rare pleasure. It’s been centuries since she’s had sex right after a feeding, and she’d managed to forget how good it feels. Nearly as enjoyable as the main event.

“Riven,” she murmurs, “Oh, fuck, _Riven_.”

As she comes hard with a werewolf’s head between her thighs on the floor of a storage room, the tie between them weaves its magic tighter and tighter. If she had stopped herself at the first strand, at the opening that allowed her to command with ultimate obedience, it all might have been fine.

But pathways can be travelled one direction as well as they can the opposite.

And Katarina has made the rookie mistake of forgetting to close the gate behind her.


	2. Chapter 2

Riven no longer feels the shiver of supernatural desire to obey when Katarina tries to use the glamored voice on her. She’d been able to resist it, up until the first time Katarina gave in to the desire to feed from her, until that one and only command that worked.

But she hadn’t drained Riven, like she’d half expected would happen. She’d stopped, and she’d yielded to Riven’s desires – desires that make Riven flush hot, grateful for her complexion and its ability to hide the reaction when she remembers that night.

Riven felt it, in that moment, although she didn’t realize what it was at the time.

And now Katarina’s commands are nothing. She had one word that worked, that opened some kind of magical connection between them, but she’d failed to do something right, and that opening had backfired and granted Riven immunity.

Immunity and… something else. Something strange and unwanted.

She’d been ready to dismiss that night of fervor as a strange releasing of tension, of perhaps a confused result of adrenaline and the vampire’s aphrodisiac venom.

Riven is… not entirely certain how to deal with the matter of her sexual attraction to Katarina, laid bare and exposed. Ultimately, does she need to address it? It changes nothing. She is still singular in her conviction that she must escape and bring upon this clan the fury of a united pack the size of which they’ve never seen in their miserably long lives – as soon as she figures out how to do that, but. Step one first. Worry about uniting the packs later.

It shouldn’t complicate or change her mission that she’d immensely enjoyed being fed upon by a vampire, that she’d taken said vampire into her own mouth and hands of her own volition, determined to contribute her own voice to the tone of the evening in a fit of pride.

That now, in strange wafts when they were near each other, she can suddenly feel the brush of Katarina’s emotions… well. Having sympathy for her own personal devil doesn’t complicate things either, so much as muddy her focus a little.

Of course, it pisses Katarina off to no end that her voice doesn’t work on Riven anymore. She doesn’t even _need_ to resist it, as she’d been for the months leading up to the fight (the fight, the feeding, the fucking) in the storeroom. It simply has no effect.

Katarina tries it on her for the third time, since that evening, and finally Riven turns blankly to her and says,

“You know that won’t work on my anymore. You’re performing for an audience that doesn’t exist.” She pauses, and thinks about this statement – thinks about the other vampires who bring their various ‘beasts’ to compete against one another, all thralls of their supernatural mastery, or else browbeaten, broken slaves in the traditional sense. Katarina certainly has a reputation to uphold in front of them, if the twinge of nervous tension Riven feels across their bond at the notion of the audience is any indication.

“Don’t be so damn smug,” Katarina snaps, closing the door behind her and crossing the room angrily. “I _saw_ it work on you.”

“Once,” Riven says softly, her face blank, “and never again.”

“If you think that changes your situation, you’re wrong,” Katarina says, and suddenly Riven can no longer detect what she’s feeling. “You did as you were told before then, and you’ll continue to do as you’re told.” Her hand whips out and grabs Riven’s chin, forcing her to look her in the eye.

Riven regards her evenly, and says nothing – only focuses on keeping her breathing and her heartrate even and steady. She has long suspected it annoys her captor that she has such mastery over her physical tells, and with this new link between their spikes of emotions, she knows it now for a fact.

Katarina frowns, and pushes Riven’s face aside as if in disgust.

“I should just kill you,” she mutters.

But, thinks Riven, you like the way I taste too much to do away with me entirely.

“You’re worried about your reputation?” Riven muses. “I’ll feign obedience when others around.”

“Oh, you will, will you?” Katarina sneers. “So very kind of you. I think you’re forgetting exact the situation you’re in, _dog_. You are my property. You are trapped. Have I not proved the futility of escape attempts?”

Riven says nothing.

-

The emotional connection proves a distraction, at first, during battles. Riven’s not used to the distraction of someone else’s flaring thrill and excitement and approval – and hunger – while she’s trying to focus on anticipating an opponent’s moves. She takes a sharp blow to the face from the manticore, momentarily thrown off by the loudness of the vampire’s lust for her.

Riven tastes her own blood and tries to filter out Katarina’s obnoxious contributions – that flutter of concern at the strike had to have been her imagination – and keep her mind on the fight.

Stupid, stupid, she reflexively tries to block instead of dodge, and for her efforts she gets a manticore stinger through her forearm. With a roar of pain, she pushes forward and forces the point of the foot-long stinger out the other side of her flesh as it pumps its toxins. Even so, she feels its paralysis stiffening the muscles of her right arm.

She needs to end this fight _now_ , before it can get worse.

Mercenary ruthlessness kicks in and when the manticore looms close, certain it has made a meal of its opponent, Riven swings her head fast and buries her fangs deep into its exposed windpipe. In a fury, the manticore yanks its stinger out of her arm and strikes enraged blows into Riven’s torso that burn like sword wounds doused in acid. She bites down harder and shakes her head before the paralysis can take hold. She must kill it, and fast.

Somewhere in the background of the crowd’s excited commentary and the terror and desperation of fighting for her life, she feels the razor sharp intensity of Katarina’s concern.

It disgusts her, that this vampire cares whether she lives or dies. That she thinks Riven even somewhat sympathetic to her cause, to her wicked syndrome, such that she extends even a moment’s concern for her life.

Let it be pride, Riven thinks, and on the fire of this hatred she musters her last burst. Let Katarina’s worry be for her own reputation, let her alarm be at the loss of something she has invested time and energy into.

Riven rips the manticore’s throat out. Somewhere in the audience, its owner cries foul.

And then she hits the bloodied sands of the pit, her wounds burning like nothing she’s ever felt before, and finds it’s getting harder and harder to breathe.

-

She wakes up in her cell, a foul taste in her mouth.

Her whole body aches. Riven looks down at herself and realizes she’s still in wolf form. Large swathes of her fur have been shaved away around several enormous, furiously inflamed puncture marks. Some sort of shiny cream has been slathered liberally around them.

“I see you’re conscious. Took you long enough,” Katarina says. How long, Riven wonders, has she sat holed up in here.

Riven tries to say something, manages to croak out a sandy rasp before realizing she’s a snout and a few fangs too far from human to be doing much talking. She forces herself through the change back to human, feeling somehow that she desperately needs to communicate something, but the effort required is so great that she’s barely finished before she passes out again.

-

Riven’s eyes take some work to open the second time around, crusted over with some sort of dried mucus. She blinks them open eventually, and then gasps in a breath of air that makes her every muscle groan miserably.

And there’s Katarina again, frowning.

“Waste of damn time, sitting around waiting for you to hurry up and heal,” the vampire grouses. Riven can _feel_ her relief, and it’s bizarre and discomfiting. Katarina comes to crouch down beside her, sitting on the edge of the cot, and only then does Riven register that there is now a _bed_ in her prison cell.

Interesting. Maybe there’s a way to use the components somehow to gain her freedom. Too much to hope for, of course, that the legs would be made of wood. Wood can be made into stakes – Katarina is clearly a young vampire, but wouldn’t make that obvious of an error.

“It took absolute ages to find someone who knew what stupid concoction dogs like you need to heal after a huge dose of manticore poison. Most of them just dispose of any beasts stupid enough to take seven hits from one of their stingers. _Seven_! They told me not to bother even trying to get you back into fighting shape, and they were probably all right.”

“Your damn fault anyways,” Riven grunts, leaning back into the – yes, a pillow! Imagine such a luxury given by someone who once scoffed at the idea of Riven wanting more than just raw meat to eat.

“ _My_ fault? How exactly does that make any sense?” Katarina snaps, opening a jar of waxy-smelling salve and scooping a blob of it up into her elegant, aristocratic palm.

“I was distracted by your – “ Riven hesitates. They haven’t talked about this. She’s not even sure the connection is two-way, although it seems like Katarina reacts to her moods and spikes of feelings like she can sometimes feel them. But what if that’s just her reading Riven’s body language? She looks down as Katarina starts applying the salve, wincing as the cold goop touches the hot, tight skin around her puncture wounds. “You’re putting it on too thick. That’s what I was trying to say, earlier, before I passed out again.”

“What?”

“That’s eclipse heather salve, isn’t it? It smells like it.”

“It was the only thing I could get on short notice. It usually does the trick for wolves to help them with anything their bodies can’t handle without help.”

“I thought so – you’re – you’ve got it slathered on really thick. Having more of it doesn’t – “ Riven hisses through her teeth at Katarina’s less than gentle application. “Having more of it on doesn’t make it heal better. Just a thin layer so it can breathe will do more good.” The effort of communicating this specific piece of knowledge takes a lot more out of Riven than she’d expected it to, and she finishes her sentence by closing her eyes and leaning back into her pillow. Katarina says nothing, but her layers of salve feel noticeably thinner against Riven’s aching, burning skin.

Katarina doesn’t pursue the deliberately waylaid conversation about how exactly she distracted Riven. It’s probably for the best.

-

It’s been weeks since Katarina fed from Riven, and if Riven had to guess, not a day has gone by that Katarina hasn’t had at least one fleeting surge of hunger in her presence.

The close proximity required by the salve application makes it that much worse. Katarina is manipulating Riven’s punctured arm one day, putting the ointment on both the entrance and exit wounds, holding her by the wrist while Riven patiently endures, and there is a pause.

They’re so close, Riven could swear she feels the echoes of the sudden pulse of Katarina’s aching hunger reverberating in her chest cavity. Her heart rate picks up against her will, with the vampire holding her limb so firmly, studying its shape so intently.

“Are you afraid of me?” Katarina asks, without taking her eyes away from Riven’s wrist, grasped gingerly but inescapably. The question is a confused mess of emotions that Riven can only taste the faintest jumbled trace of through their link. Pride. Insecurity. Hope. Disappointment. Desire. Arrogance.

Mud in the water, clouding her priorities. Riven tries to shake her mind free of all that.

“I’m sure you’d like me to believe I ought to be,” she answers, consciously slowing her breathing, bringing down her heart rate.

“Belief has nothing to do with whether you should be afraid of me,” Katrina says, more sullen and brooding than a character in a morality play. Riven wants to laugh at the charicature of herself Katarina paints, but resists the temptation.

“You were there, the night I was taken. I believe the hunt was led by your sire,” Riven remarks coolly. “You’d know better than I, how many vampires it took to bring me down.” Startled, Katarina at last breaks her fixed stare away from Riven’s wrist and brings her eyes around to look the werewolf in the face.

“What?”

“Five,” Riven says, quietly and solidly. “Five vampires, at least one of them an elder. You know as well as I do why you starve me.” Riven holds her gaze even as anger boils below the surface of Katarina’s expression. “Because you understand enough of my capabilities to realize _you_ should be afraid of _me._ ”

Katarina stands suddenly and throws the jar of salve at Riven.

“Sounds like you’re feeling better. You can dress your own damn injuries.” And with that, she storms out and slams the door behind her.

-

Riven eats unusually well during her recovery from the manticore fight, and she has no intention of letting the rare glut of nutrition go to waste. There’s little enough space in her cell, but she stays awake as long as she can into the early hours of dawn to feel the sunlight on her face and exercise to the best of her ability when she knows she’ll be unobserved.

Katarina allows her, to Riven’s count, two full weeks to finish recovering.

By the time those two weeks are up, all traces of the puckered sting marks are gone, and Riven is probably in the best shape she’s been since she was captured.

The march to the Pit in her thick, heavy collar is unusually tense. Katarina says nothing, engages in only the most superficial of gloating about her White Wolf’s return to battle. It’s likely clear to everyone that she’s nervous about how this fight will go. Her pride is on the line, it would seem.

Riven’s opponent is another werewolf. She makes a practice of not killing the werewolves, if she can help it, although there’s never any guarantee that the person she’s against will treat her with the same courtesy in this bloodied hole of desperation and despair.

The werewolf is covered in scars from what can only be recent and ruthless lashings. Riven does not waste time with posturing, and uses the time before the fight to analyze, instead, how much of a nuisance Katarina’s emotions in the back of her head will be. If she can just corral them to somewhere that she isn’t slowed by them, she should be fine.

The battle begins, and this cowed and brutalized fellow of hers makes a great performative show of snarling and lunging, but has little to offer in the way of sincere threat. Riven realizes from the quiet whisper of Katarina’s fear that from the audience, this isn’t apparent. Interesting.

Amused by the fact that these vampires don’t yet perceive the mismatch, Riven allows her scarred opponent to almost, _almost_ land a hit a few times. It’s hard not to feel a little bit smug when every “near miss” makes Katarina’s concern spike.

It feels good, to stretch her muscles, to dance – to feel powerful and to play with someone much slower, much more tired, much more… broken. When the realization strikes, the joy leeches from Riven’s limbs.

The vampires have not realized the scarred werewolf is outclassed in every way, but he himself has. Riven pounces upon him to end the charade, preparing to take his throat firmly in her teeth and pin him to secure a bloodless victory. He brings his great shaggy arm to guard his neck, and Riven bites down into it; he doesn’t even flinch.

“Kill,” he rasps, feather-soft, through awkward fangs and with an uncooperative tongue. His eyes deliver the message with finality, and his meaning is clear. He is begging for release, not mercy. The punching bag of the Pit, then – the one reserved for injured or new fighters, to sharpen their claws on. How long has he been here?

It takes a remarkable amount of effort to kill a werewolf.

With a determined motion, Riven rolls them, sending sand flying in wild dramatic clouds. It makes it less obvious that he isn’t struggling when she wraps an arm around his neck. What are the ways to do this quickly? Take his heart, take his head – both viable. Breaking his back is something it’s possible for a werewolf to recover fully from.

When the dust settles, Riven has only the vague whiff of Katarina’s awe to offer any insight on what she must look like, standing at her full height with the other werewolf’s neck held firm in a headlock as she loops her leg over one of his shoulders to hold him steady and then with a great growling heave rips his head clean off.

They don’t need to know that she’d already choked him to unconsciousness by the time that happened. No sense in making his last few moments more gruesome than they had to be.

Sensing she’s made a bit of a spectacle, she throws the head to the side, turns her eyes up to the crowd – inevitably finding Katarina’s eyes, and loudly rumbles through her monstrous maw an approximation of one word:

“ _Next._ ”

-

It wasn’t on the docket for the day, but they make Riven fight three more opponents in succession. None are quite as brutally ended or as mismatched as the first, but Riven comes away victorious from all of them with only a dozen or so shallow cuts and gouges to show for it.

The glory of her wins restores Katarina’s reputation, and the vampire is absolutely smug with success.

“Come,” she purrs, floating down the hallways and tugging Riven’s leash absentmindedly. “I think I know just how to reward you.”

When they reach the chamber and Riven’s eyes fall upon the great brass tub and the steam rising from the water within, Riven can’t help but chuckle.

“Is this a reward for _me_ ,” she quips, “or for _you_?”

“Since when do you have a sense of humor?” Katarina smirks, shutting the door. Riven is about to muster some sort of witty (maybe only semi-witty) retort when Katarina saunters past and slaps her in the ass hard enough that the noise echoes through the elegant chamber. “Get those clothes off!”

It’s just playful enough that Riven is too startled to really know what to say. If it had been imperious she’d be angry, but it wasn’t. And, ultimately, she does have to take her clothes off to get in the bath.

Her rags hit the floor before Katarina is even to the tub. She doesn’t ask permission, and climbs right inside. Riven groans as she lowers her hard-worked muscles into the hot water, sinking in down to eye level before even bothering to check up on what Katarina is up to.

It’s a strange sight, a vampire with her sleeves rolled up and a scrub brush in her hand, and it takes all of Riven’s significant amounts of self control not to laugh at the absurdity of her terrible situation.

“You’re filthy,” Katarina complains, astonished as just how much grime comes off of Riven’s skin when scrubbed. When they finally get to her hair, Katarina gasps, “It’s a completely different colour than I thought it was. Your hair is actually _white_ – this is – this is probably the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe I’ve ever touched you.”

“You’re welcome to leave me alone and let me bathe myself,” Riven snorts.

“As if you know how to do it properly. Just how much soap must it take to keep a white werewolf white?” Katarina doesn’t hold back, digging her fingers deep into Riven’s scalp, and despite all her instincts screaming at her not to, Riven finds herself actually enjoying the sensation and relaxing into the rough massage. Apparently determined to reveal all of Riven’s original skin, Katarina works silently and vigorously. It isn’t the most soothing bath Riven’s ever had, but it’s probably the most thorough.

After a while, Katarina’s hands slow.

“Right before you killed that first werewolf,” she says, thoughtful and precise, “I caught something from you I wasn’t expecting.”

Riven says nothing. Katarina rubs muck out from between her toes contemplatively before continuing.

“He asked you to do that, didn’t he?”

Riven thinks.

“What did you feel?”

“What?”

“You said you felt something from me. Something that makes you think he asked me to kill him. What was it?”

It is Katarina’s turn to fall into a lull of contemplative silence. She methodically purges the dirt between all of Riven’s toes, and only when she’s done this does she answer:

“An overwhelming sadness. A sense of duty. Of obligation.”

“Then you don’t need me to tell you what happened tonight.”


End file.
